I spent much of the day with Ian Wallman, who taught me how to use Ableton Live. I’ve been messing about with it for a while now, on and off, but without terribly much success. It’s a music making /editing / remixing / performance piece of software, and it is, quite frankly, superb.

There was a steep learning curve for about three hours in the middle of the day, but I’ve come away with the ability to use it – and I’m already more than halfway through a remix project that’s been sitting on the shelves for the past couple of months.

The afternoon was spent largely in errands (train tickets to London for Easter Weekend, a stop at the post office, Muji for a bit of stationery) and continuing to play with Ableton and building on the big start earlier in the day.

Couple of interesting emails today:

Mark Jansen from Current, the newspaper about public radio and TV in the US, is writing an article about Ira Glass, host of This American Life, to commemorate the show’s10th anniversary on air. It is, quite simply, the single best radio show on the planet.

I once wrote a brief response on Transom.org to Ira Glass’s Manifesto (is it still called sycophantic if you genuinely think the person concerned is truly great?) and Mark stumbled across it in his research. He wants to interview me for the article.

I think I score exotic points for not being from America, and yet still being a fan of an American public radio show. It’s probably fair to say that Ira Glass is both directly and indirectly responsible for about half to two-thirds of everything I know about radio (and yes, that all happened since I left the industry)..

I got word that I’d been successful in my application for a research grant of £1000 to spend on the services of a software developer, a spot of travel, some assorted (as yet unspecified) online music services and a bunch of books. I’m going to build a bit of software with a local online music company that will help to streamline the process of digitisation for small-medium music SMEs. Hopefully.

The only stipulation for the grant is that I have to agree to talk about music, the internet and related geekery in front of a room full of people sometime in September. “Will that be okay?” Clearly these people haven’t met me.

I’ve also decided I’d like a Mac. I do this about every 6 months. I played with Ian’s today, and the software is just so beautifully integrated. Enhanced podcasting using a combination of Garageband and iWeb is just a superb package – far in advance of anything you can do on a PC – especially in terms of its elegance and simplicity.

Still, with a Mac, you can’t really get under the hood and tinker. I’m up late tonight entering new code into the system registry so that I can make my Digidesign M-Box work as an external soundcard for the laptop. That’s genuinely in the instructions that came with the audio driver: change the registry. The Mac version just works.

And then I remember I have three PCs – and a Mac would be mostly incompatible with everything else. And then there’s all that stuff I do for which there is no equivalent bit of Mac software.

They’ve got me.